Two Lessons from Evil

In Cambodia are the Killing Fields. There, the Khmer Rouge committed 1.5 to 3 million political murders in the late 1970’s. The Killing Fields are so named because many thousands of victims were mass-murdered and immediately buried there. Many victims were buried alive.

Evil is real.

Is the determination of evil a mere social construct? Can 3 million people’s deliberate killings be rationalized? Do we simply fail to comprehend the perceived necessity of the termination of 3 million people?

Do you believe the actors thought that they were achieving something good? No they did not.

The most dedicated relativist knows that atrocities like this are abhorrent. All people know this is abjectly wrong.

If the moral relativist or the multiculturalist can claim that anything is objectively wrong, relativism goes out the window. The relativist cannot acknowledge that atrocities were done by Khmer Rouge then walk away and claim that absolute truth does not exist.

The first lesson that evil teaches us is that objective truth is real. If there is anything objectively wrong, you must admit that there is an absolute moral standard; there is good, and there is evil.

The worst evils are proof that human beings everywhere understand that good and evil are objective and real. If the relativist still disagrees, take his wallet and see if he appeals to some ethical standard he expects you to know about.

The second lesson that evil teaches us is this: if you can recognize that the murdered of the Khmer Rouge were victims of evil, that Rwandan genocide victims died because of evil, that six million Jews died at the hands of an evil final solution…then you are also able to recognize that sixty million pre-born children have died by the same kind of evil.

Our modern and enlightened culture, to its shame, struggles hard to rationalize these killings away.

If you cannot recognize that the abortion of unborn children is unequivocally wrong, (and let us recognize that every abortive method is violent), then you ought to be concerned. If you can rationalize away such death, such injustice, such evil, you have cause to examine yourself.